Ramblings on Reading and Following Blogs

I had fun reading blogs yesterday.  Of course, that was not all that I did yesterday, since I had research to do.  But, yesterday, I did something that I don’t normally do.  I had just finished my blog post about William Lane Craig’s 1980 book, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (see my post here).  Because Craig is a Christian apologist, and the cosmological argument is an argument that many classical Christian apologists like to use, my post got tagged on WordPress with the label of “apologetics.”  WordPress then asked me if I wanted to see what other people were writing about apologetics.  I indicated that I did, and I was lead to a page that looks like my WordPress reader—-where I read the posts of blogs that I am following—-only it had blogs that I was not following.  I found some interesting posts there!

It was like an adventure.  I was going out into the unknown.  I like to do that, every now and then.  I keep the number of blogs that I follow at a minimum for a variety of reasons.  Perhaps the biggest reason is that I want the posts on my WordPress reader to be posts that interest me, and I do not want posts that do not interest me as much to crowd them out.  Moreover, I was one time following a blog, and this guy’s stuff was virtually dominating my WordPress reader!  I did not care for that, so I stopped following the blog.  I also don’t care for when WordPress recommends other blogs for me to follow.  Sometimes I follow its recommendations, but often I don’t.

How do I find out about blogs?  I guess that, ordinarily, its through links that people make to them.  Someone in the biblioblogosphere refers to a post, I check it out, and I look at the rest of the blog to see if its general content interests me, or if I can find it useful.  Or someone makes a comment on another blog that catches my eye, and I then follow the trail to that person’s blog and make my determination over whether or not to follow it.  Or someone comments on my blog, and I check out that person’s blog.  In some cases, I have no idea how I encountered particular blogs, but I somehow found them, and I kept on reading them.  I’ve actually been following some blogs for years.  It doesn’t seem to me like it’s been that long, but it has.

In some cases, I’m upset when there is not much reciprocity—-when I comment and get no response, or I share a post and get no thank you.  Most of the time, though, I am not that sensitive, and this surprises me, since I can be quite touchy.  It probably depends on a blog’s content.  If I get little reciprocity, yet I enjoy reading the blog, I’ll keep on following it.  If it has just all-right (in my eyes) content and I’m getting no reciprocity, I may stop reading it.  Then there’s the matter of expectations: if it’s a big blog that has lots of followers and tons of comments, then I don’t expect reciprocity, and I’m not disappointed when I don’t receive it.

Anyway, yesterday was fun because I got to explore, something I don’t do that often.

I probably sound like a huge blog-snob.  I’m not, though.  I respect everyone who chooses to write and tell his or her story.  There are just things that interest me, and things that do not so much.  That goes for how others may respond to my blog, for that matter!  But my interests are not always the key to whether I keep on reading a blog.  Sometimes, it is a matter of relationships: if I have read and enjoyed a blog for a period of time, and the blogger and I have conversed, then I will keep on reading that blog, even if not all of the posts fit my areas of interest.

Those are my ramblings for today!